Extra! Update December 2001

Open the Washington Post to its editorial pages the day after the September 11 attacks, and war talk dominates. Henry Kissinger: “Destroy the Network.” Robert Kagan: “We Must Fight This War.” Charles Krauthammer: “To War, Not to Court.” William S. Cohen: “American Holy War.” There is no column by Colman McCarthy talking peace. From 1969 to 1997, McCarthy wrote a column for the Washington Post. He was let go because the column, he was told, wasn’t making enough money for the company. “The market has spoken,” was the way Robert Kaiser, the managing editor at the Post, put it at …

Days after their son Greg died in the World Trade Center terror, Phyllis and Orlando Rodriguez wrote a letter to the New York Times that counseled against “violent revenge, with the prospect of sons, daughters, parents, friends in distant lands dying, suffering, and nursing further grievances against us. It is not the way to go. It will not avenge our son’s death. Not in our son’s name. Our son died a victim of an inhuman ideology…. Let us not as a nation add to the inhumanity of our times.” The New York Times didn’t publish the letter: It is just …

In the weeks leading up to the U.S. bombing campaign in Afghanistan, news watchers grew accustomed to poll stories with headlines like the Washington Post’s “Public Unyielding in War Against Terror; 9 in 10 Back Robust Military Response” (9/29/01). The numbers seemed overwhelming: Two out of three respondents to the Post poll “would favor military action even if the result was a long war in which large numbers of U.S. troops were killed.” Such reports give the impression that Americans are, as the Post declared, “unswerving” in their support for war and unified in their “demand for a full-scale response.” …